The sudden departure of Marginfi’s co-founder Edgar Pavlovsky from the Solana DeFi project in April 2024 was not an amicable one. Pavlovsky voiced his dissatisfaction with the project’s internal and external dynamics, saying he didn’t “agree with the way things have been done internally or externally.”
Eight months have passed since his departure, and Pavlovsky is now a significant contributor to Paladin, a client of Solana. Paladin is designed to protect validators from sandwich attacks while increasing their block reward earnings.
Around the same time, Temporal, a cryptocurrency research firm with several Marginfi-affiliated members, started advertising Nozomi, a proprietary quic client partially designed to prevent sandwich attacks. Temporal, however, maintains its legal distinction from Marginfi and asserts that the majority of its staff never worked at Marginfi.
Interestingly, both Nozomi and Paladin focus on the same niche, although there is a key difference. Paladin has a token, while Marginfi has yet to launch its own, a controversial point.
Temporal’s Nozomi is designed to execute transactions as quickly as possible by only sending transactions to ‘whitelisted’ Solana validators known to be trustworthy. The aim is to democratize trading, according to Jakob Povsic, a developer at Temporal.
In contrast, Paladin, a fork of the Jito-Solana client, identifies and drops sandwich attacks from transaction bundles and helps Solana validators prioritize transactions with high priority fees attached. Access to Paladin validators will be gated with the yet-to-launched PAL token.
When asked if he was driven to compete more aggressively due to the similarity of his product to Temporal’s, Pavlovsky responded with a chuckle. He expressed admiration for them, stating that numerous businesses can succeed simultaneously in the blockchain infrastructure space.
Povsic, on the other hand, was less diplomatic. He criticized Paladin’s approach as naive and self-serving, saying that it arbitrarily blocks transactions and sophisticated players could still perpetrate sandwich attacks. The imposition of its own token further exacerbated his concerns.
Pavlovsky retorted that Paladin’s anti-sandwich whitelist is systematic, not arbitrary, and is designed with advanced players in mind. He invited open discussions on tradeoffs.
A noteworthy aspect of this development is the PAL token. Marginfi has been criticized for its point program, used to track user contributions and allocate token airdrops. However, Marginfi is one of the last major Solana DeFi protocols not to release a token, a point that Pavlovsky did not mention during his departure.
When asked if the lack of a token contributed to his exit, Pavlovsky said he is pro-token and believes one should have been launched in Q4 2023.
In conclusion, this ongoing saga between Marginfi, Paladin, and Temporal continues to unfold. With different approaches to tackling sandwich attacks, and the lingering issue of token launch, it will be interesting to watch how these projects evolve in response to each other.
